Toronto's sports teams are so bad, the Raptors just making the playoffs would be cause for celebration, Dave Feschuk writes.

It’s been nearly 17 years since the Blue Jays won a post-season game, and it'll be nearly six years next month since the Maple Leafs last played in one. The Argos haven't won a playoff game in nearly four years — which, considering they play in a seven-owner loop, is a disgrace equivalent to a 20-season drought in real-league years.

Certainly there are sporting cities with sadder mythologies than Toronto’s. Cleveland hasn’t won a championship of note since the Browns in 1964 — in a time before the Super Bowl. But Cleveland, in the here and now, has LeBron James and, by definition, a chance.

Buffalo has had its near misses at Super Bowls and Stanley Cups, a Wide Right and a bogus Brett Hull goal against. But Buffalo, at least, has seen a Stanley Cup final since 1967. And it’s also currently home to an actual hockey star, Ryan Miller.

Sports fans in Toronto can’t say any of that about their town. They can’t have a realistic conversation about Hogtown’s next championship team in the making, because there isn’t one remotely close to taking shape. But a playoff team? When you look at the Raptors through the lens of their Toronto sporting brethren, the stakes they’re playing for on Wednesday night, when the New York Knicks visit the Air Canada Centre, are positively epic.

No, the Raptors shouldn't even be in this position, fighting for the eighth and final Eastern playoff spot in Game 82 of an 82-game season. And yes, there are are still plenty of unanswered questions about what happened to turn a team that was 29-23 at the all-star break into a struggler that has gone 10-19 since. You can blame Chris Bosh’s post-all-star ankle injury, you can accuse him of preserving his body for impending free agency after the ankle injury was no longer a viable excuse. Or you can, as GM Bryan Colangelo has done, blame ``individual agendas’’ in a fractured locker room for the abysmal play.

But you can’t deny that the bar has been lowered around these parts. A post-season team’s a rarity in this town. So while there is plenty of room to critique the basketball brain trust for a long list of sins — the Raptors have a sub-.500 record in the Colangelo era, after all — the man in the high collars is a relative high achiever among his local peers.

If there is good news in Raptorland on Wednesday night, Colangelo will have made the playoffs three out of his four seasons here. When he inherited the team, they were en route to missing the post-season for the fourth straight time.

Still, the picture isn’t promising for the franchise, long-term or near, not with Bosh staring down free agency this summer, not with Bosh out of the lineup for Wednesday night’s game with facial fractures. In the five seasons since Bosh first became an all-star, the Raptors have lost 39 of the 56 games in which he has been absent. That's a .304 winning percentage. And what are the odds he’ll be able to play in a theoretical playoff series that would open on the weekend at No. 1-seeded Cleveland?

``It remains unknown (if Bosh will be able to play in the playoffs) at the moment,’’ Colangelo said in an email Tuesday. ``It is still planned that he will be seen by the (Cleveland-based) treating physician (this week) at which point they will assess his progress and discuss ongoing circumstances and the associated risk of playing in his condition. He may also be fitted for a mask at that time if a return to action is contemplated.’’

Even with Bosh, Toronto would be massive underdogs in a series against the Cavs. There’s a huge gap between the league’s haves and have-nots, and that the Raptors reside on the wrong side of the chasm.

But victories, in a sporting city that still packs the ACC for hockey and hoops, aren't always counted in the column marked W. Brian Burke says he won the Phil Kessel trade, Kessel says he’s thinking about winning the battle of the bulge this summer, and the faithful froth. Richard Peddie, CEO of the monolith that dominates the Toronto sporting scene, says Burke and Colangelo are ``two of the best general managers in hockey and basketball ... and I know my way around the leagues.’’

Burke’s team finished 29th. Colangelo’s has won 39 games. If Toronto really is the centre of the universe, maybe it’s an alternate universe. Listen for the horn honks if the Raptors clinch the privilege of being pummelled by LeBron. Toronto’s sporting teams are, to an outfit, a long way from a championship, or championship contention, or the promising stage when an exciting young team finds itself on the precipice of the latter. But it beats following war and pestilence.

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